Nothing is more effective in a "pitch" (aka demo) than showing organisations you can rebrand their website in your software (hopefully MOSS 2007) in < 1 day.

I've completely rebranded MOSS several times using a Minimal Master Page and borrowing CSS files and images from customer's external website or their corporate intranet.

To rebuild an intranet/internet site for a demo/proof of concept these are the steps I go through:

  • Analyse the existing website.
    • Is there a consistent look and feel for this? i.e. Navigation up to; nav on left; content in middle?
    • Global
      • How does the primary navigation work?
      • How does the secondary navigation work?
      • Is there a bread crumb
      • What is the footer?
    • Home Page
      • Is there content roll ups?
      • Is there content aggregation from external sites?
    • Detail page
      • What does the page structure look like?
      • Is there a common structure for this?
      • Are these basic pages or complex pages (i.e. are there applications being embedded etc.)
    • Grab a dump of their existing site
      • Browse to the site and do a SAFE AS from Internet Explorer
        • This will give you the CSS, the HTML and the graphics.
  • Create the artefacts
    • Create a master page (you may require 2 master pages (1 for Home Page and 1 for other pages which includes a left nav)
      • Copy the navigation controls from the default.master or the other master pages.
    • Create a custom CSS file
      • Get the navigation styling right.
      • Get the overall font-family and font-size right – this will make a huge difference.
    • Include the Custom CSS on the master page(s).
    • Look and feel pictures - Upload the images for structure into the /Images/ library
    • Create a page layout for the home page (if none of the OOB ones are suitable)
    • Create a page layout for the detail pages (if none of the OOB ones are suitable).
      • Configure the left navigation for the site.
  • Create the Content – this is the key thing! You want the customer to identify with the site.
    • Upload "content images" into the Site Collection Images library.
    • Create the home page
      • Populate the home page
      • Configure the roll ups from other parts of the site.
    • Create the detail pages
      • Create a sub site
        • Create the pages and populate them with content from the customer's site
        • If you don't want to do this manually you could look at www.metalogix.net – I'll be posting a link to a demo live meeting shortly.
  • Additional things which are awesome
    • Content Query Web Part
      • Show rolling content up from other areas of the site based on some meta data.
    • Search
      • WCM and Search go hand in hand. If you can show easily searching the content from the site this will be an advantage.
    • Standard WCM Features – sometimes as MOSS professionals we forget about the basics.
      • Versioning
      • Workflow
      • Auditing
      • Scheduling

For a customer to see you have rebuilt their intranet/internet in less than 1 day showing them that MOSS allows you to build usable websites and development time can be less than other solutions they have used.

I'll have a chat with the customers and see if I'm allowed to post my Legacy Website vs MOSS rebuild in < 8 hours – watch this space.

If you have rebranded some websites i'd love to see them – leave a comment and send it to me.